Cities of desire

Cities of desire, is a first presentation of an ongoing project about the North Sea and its economical landscape.

The harsh conditions on the North Sea make the offshore industry almost the ultimate symbol of man overcoming nature. Artificial cities of concrete and metal lie in an apparent empty sea. They leave a lot to the imagination.

After decades of prosperity and activity the North Sea landscape is changing. The low oil and gas prices and the exhaustion of wells have left some of the platforms abandoned. Questions about the future rise: are we looking at monuments, decaying junk or places of new possibilities?

The exhibition consists of pictures that were taken during a two weeks residence at the maintenance ship Kroonborg (NAM), combined with archival material from different offshore operators (Shell, Total, Wintershall). The exhibition shows photographs - Sometimes up-close, sometimes seemingly floating by- of North Sea platforms printed on sheeted steel. In the pictures the horizon shifts up and down. The scratched steel on which the images are printed comes to life in the sunlight and suggest a previous usage. There is also a film of a solemn platform in which the only movement comes from the sea creating the feeling that time has no hold on these structures.

The exhibition and work title refer to Italo Calvino’s Invisible cities. In this book Marco Polo talks about his travels with Kublai Kan. While speaking of imaginary cities, this conversation expands like a game of chess. The descriptions of these Invisible cities act as metaphor commenting on modern day life. They encompass the emotional and the mathematical, and show a sense of fear and longing. Thoughts that are very appropriate to this project.

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The exhibition was accompanied by 500 metres afar, a mini symposium. This name is a derivative of the nautical law that prohibits ships to sail closer than 500 meters from a drilling or production platform. It also represents the fact that we as an outsider never reach these platforms. The symposium was led by Esther van Duin (neuroscientist, former chairwoman De Nationale Denktank). After an introduction to the subject and the exhibition by Tanja Engelberts, Sybe Visser (Swift Drilling) talked about his extensive offshore experience working in this field for the past thirty years. Lorenzo Frankel (Follow the money) spoke about the Dutch government’s lack of decisiveness to decommission redundant platforms. The mini-symposium was rounded up by a group discussion exploring the future of the North Sea, its environmental issues and new forms of energy production.

Bozeman's Curse

Wyoming is a place of transition. The lands photographed here originally belonged to native, nomadic people. Then arrived colonists looking for gold and prosperity, later companies drilling for raw and valuable materials. When the mines ceased to bear wealth, they looked still deeper to unearth riches below ground - and turned to fracking.

At first glance perhaps the land photographed here - Bozeman’s trail - doesn’t seem to be a very distinctive place. Void of houses, people and traffic, a vast emptiness opens up. John M. Bozeman, this work’s protagonist and namesake, was the first to cross the land in search of gold. His digging was the start of human imposition on these lands; the title lends the work this story of place.

Like a map, the image – dived – unfolds. The technique of etching somewhat bites an image into the surface of the plate and is itself a form of erosion - akin to the blight on this land. The shimmering, golden surface alludes to the craziness of the gold rush and the copper and brass mines surrounding Bozeman's trail – its reflection transforms the land from positive to negative. At once present and a shadow, the story of Bozeman’s trail appears tethered to its surface.

Close Range

“You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country -indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky- provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut...

...Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.”

― Annie Proulx, Close Range

Materials:Etch on brass

Dimension:H x W20 x 40 cm20 x 40 cm20 x 20 cm

The Island; Periphery, Centre and Altitude

By Nigel Frank, Curator Clifford Chance Collection.

Tanja Engelberts combines a photographic and sculptural practice, the one informing the other. Understanding photography as being experienced solely through the eye, she uses sculptural installations to explore how photography can relate to the body, how movement and space can affect the viewing experience. Her recent imagery reflects a fascination with corporate architecture, particularly the concept of the ‘Silver Aesthetic’, a 1970s coinage that described a way modern architecture could blend with the historical backdrop. A concept that was given an ideological content by Japanese architects in the 1980s, who called it the poetics of ‘almost nothing’ and saw their architecture as ‘symbolism of the void’. Using Canary Wharf as an exemplar, Tanja believes the concept has been lost, replaced with a type of global architecture that is visually appealing but raises concerns about cultural identity. Engelberts asks the question: Can Canary Wharf, in all its functionality, be a place of wonder and contemplation?

The Clifford Chance Art Group, who selected Tanja Engelberts (b. The Netherlands, 1987) from a shortlist compiled by the University, responded to the clarity of her proposal. A sculptural intervention into their working environment that both introduces an ethereal, fleeting quality and reflects on the specifics of their office's location at Canary Wharf; the moments of beauty and isolation she captures in her photographs of the office's surroundings. 'Viewers of her work will respond to the unseen beauty that surrounds us everyday', they said.

Materials:Digital print on silk, Aluminium

Dimensions: H x W x D

The Island, Periphery

160 x 400 x 100 cmThe Island, Centre

30 x 40 x 50 cmThe Island, Altitude

190 x 100 x 150 cm

Photographs by Paul Tucker

Place

‘Every landscape is a hermetic narrative: finding a fitting place for oneself in the world, is finding a place for oneself in a story’ - from Lucy Lippard, Lure of the local

‘Place’ is a collage piece made out of hundreds fragile ceramic tiles, each tile printed with a delicate photograph. The work shows us personal snap shots from a family album, empty landscapes where sometimes a figure emerges. ‘Place’ is about recollection, remembering places once visited and the fragility of those memories.

Materials:Silkscreen print on ceramic, rope

Dimension:H x W170 x 160 cm

Crowd

Crowd captures the movement of the endless city Tokyo. The base of the work is a series of collages, in which hundreds of people are moving through an eerie cityscape. As ghostlike figures they appear and disappear. The collages form the sketches for an installation in which some of the figures are broken up in fragments, printed on transparent sheets they hang from the sealing, only to be seen from the front as whole. By walking through the exhibition the viewer becomes part of the installation.

Materials:xerox print on transparencies, thread

Dimensions:Life sized installation

Portal

Two masked figures seem to hover over the viewer. There stance mirrors the two wooden guards at the Niō gate protecting Japanese Buddhist temples. Where as the eyes play an important role in the original figures, the eyes of these guardians are covered with collages of 70ies futuristic architecture, for Engelberts a symbol of solitary and anonymous city life. Together they form a portal.

Materials:Overhead projection on golden wall

Dimension:H x W180 x 850 cm

Acquaintances-Jolien

The act of looking at photographs is primarily a personal and private affair. It is integral to the attentive nature of photography: we are looking at somebody looking. “Every photograph is a certification of presence” as Roland Barthes (1980, p.87) puts it. When Barthes (1980) talks about photography it is always about the singular image. The studium is the flow of images that arouse a kind of general interest, and have a general meaning that is available and obvious to everyone (like a newspaper photograph). It is when a detail, a gesture, a ‘partial object’ attracts our attention, the punctum of the photograph pierces through. It activates the viewer, derives a personal relationship, and fixes in our mind without vanishing.

Aqcuaintances Jolien, is a work that consists out of two light boxes, both are showing the same photograph of a young woman, sitting in front of a window. The sun is softly touching her skin, and lights up the little hairs of her eyelashes, she gazes into the camera with a slight awkwardness. The background plays a vital part in the picture, the lightness, the soft blue colours that suggest a landscape that stretches out to infinity. The light from the box pierces through the photograph, as if the light in her face comes from an internal source.

The space between the two lightboxes allows our eyes to gaze from subject to background and compose a story. Perhaps the punctum of the picture , the light on her eyelashes, reminds us of something else.

Séance

In the wake of the economical crises, Séance strange-mirrored images of boardrooms reflect on the opaque world of meetings, deals and mergers within the financial world.

Materials:Digital print on silk, Sapele wood

Dimensions: H x W x D40 x 50 x 20 cm40 x 80 x 20 cm

Acquaintances: Jacob

In the series Acquaintances Engelberts explores the way we perceive a photographic image. How the eye seems to hover over the portrait of a young man, sometimes seeing just the background of the brutalist architecture or the colour of the green grass in front. Simultaneously, the light boxes form a fragment and a whole, the eyes wonder as we move trough the image.

Doodenboek / Oranjehotel

DoodenboekTwo sculptures stretch through the long corridor where Death Cell 601 is located. The metal frames form an echo of the sealing above; the frames hold hundreds of portraits from the Death Books, printed on a semi transparent paper. With each step towards Death Cell 601 we pass the sculpture and we see different faces of the people who stayed here more then seventy years ago. The faces, one follows the other sometimes alternating with grey frames (a symbol for the victims still missing) seem to give a scale to Oranjehotels history.

Doodenboek / Oranjehotel

“Oranjehotel” was the popular name for a part of the prison in Scheveningen (near The Hague), in use by the Germans during the Second World War. Throughout the war, 25.000 resistance fighters and other Dutch people who resisted the German occupationwere imprisoned in the Oranjehotel, while their case was treated by the Nazi courts of justice. After sentencing the prisoners were either liberated, sent to German concentration camps or executed at the nearby Waalsdorpervlakte. The 215 prisoners that were executed spent their last days in the death cells in the middle row of cells, the D-row. Early in the morning they would leave the prison to a small gate (het Poortje) to be brought to the Waalsdorpervlakte for execution..

After the war, special monuments were created in the Oranjehotel. In row D of the cell complex one of the death cells has been kept in its original state and is called “Death Cell 601”. Even the writing of the prisoners on the walls were kept – impressive statements of fear and suffering.

‘Het Poortje’ a small gate in the long prison wall along the Van Alkemadelaan is opened only once a year, when the participants of the annual Commemoration enter the complex through it. The Death Books, which contain the names and biographies of the executed former prisoners, form a unique paper monument for the Oranjehotel and are placed in Death Cell 601 during the Commemoration. On the outside prison wall a commemorative plaque with the words “Zij waren eensgezind”, “They were united” was placed.

‘Doodenboek’ will be on permanent display from the 5th of May 2015 at the Oranjehotel Scheveningen Prison, the Hague. Visit: by appointment only www.oranjehotel.org

Materials:240 HP prints on semi tranparant paper, Perspex, metal

Dimensions: H x W x D90 x 65 x 800 cm90 x 65 x 800 cm

Volumes

Volumes is an ongoing book project. Volumes started as a way to keep track of process, by combining printed research materials (photo’s and text). It became a form of reflection and in itself a work. Compressing time in each volume.

Materials:laser print on paper

Views of Oshima, recollection of a walk

The works of Tanja Engelberts consist out of semi transparent photo sheets, hung loosely in front of one another. At fist glance we see a photographic image, but also a three-dimensional wall object where the depicted landscape is researched and scanned. They both merge and break apart; they form an intriguing addition to the medium of photography. Her presentation is thoughtful and consistent.’